


The Night You Were Conceived

by apollos



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abandonment, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Love, No Smut, Not Happy, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 01:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10843188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Sakura is the eternal mother, the eternal nurturer of those who will leave her.Or: Sasuke returns to Konoha for the night with hair that is too long and needs to be cut.





	The Night You Were Conceived

Sakura leans forward on the bed. The sheets crumple beneath her knees. She touches Sasuke's shoulder—the one with the entire arm—as lightly as possible. It feels like healing: like hovering, and channeling chakra, and hoping for the best.

"I really should go," Sasuke says, for the third time that night.

Sakura hugs him fully from behind. "No need," she whispers into his hair, which has gotten long. She needs to cut it for him. She has always cut his hair, and always will. _And when Sarada is born to her on a feverish spring morning she will look at her dark hair and her dark eyes and she will know that she will always trim that child's hair and that she will press the first locks into a book and she will say to Sasuke, look, it's us and it's real._

The night hangs outside the window, quiet, stars obscured by clouds. It is summer, and there is a storm rushing in. Sakura can feel it rustling inside of her, the electricity, and she can feel the sweat on the back of Sasuke's neck against her cheek. He smells the same as ever; his hair tickles her nose, makes her smile.

"I should go," he says again, leaning back into her.

"But when you go, you'll be gone for so long." She lowers with him, so that he's laying halfway on top of her. His weight feels less than the last time—he feels less than the last time, skin and bones and sweat and smell, wasting away. She fights the urge to pump life from her fingertips, knowing she can't fix what he has with what she has, not in that way.

"I have to," he says. He grabs one of her hands in his one hand. It's warm and dry. "You know I do."

"No, you don't." Her voice is thick with emotion she cannot hide, will not hide, not now. During the day, in front of their friends, maybe. Laugh it off. Play the good girlfriend. The understanding girlfriend. It's safer to tiptoe around Sasuke, safer to hide her emotions, something she hates doing, but when it's just them and they're in her bed— _their_ bed—and the stars are hidden by the clouds, well. She closes her eyes as not to cry.

"You're going to ask to come with me," Sasuke says.

"And you're going to say that I can't."

"And you can't."

"But _why_?" She whispers it directly in his ear, her face close enough to feel the goosebumps that arise. She shivers in response. She knows where this is going as well as he does.

He shifts, rolls off her, but pulls her close. Their noses touch. His eyes are open; she swipes his hair away so she can see them both. The Rinnegan unnerves her, still, as his missing limb once did, but she stares into it anyway. Pale lilac, rings and rings and rings like trees. Still Sasuke's eyes, the shape and the ephemeral impression that makes her heart skip, always has, always will. He looks tired.

"Because I love you," he says, and his breath is hot on her lips. She knows she must look stupid, wide-eyed, flushed. But that's how she feels, always, when she hears that: stupid, wide-eyed and flushed.

 

-

 

In the morning, she slices him thick, dripping, lushly red tomatoes, fresh from the Konoha communal gardens, and serves them beside a bowl of plain steamed noodles. She wears his shirt and nothing else, her hair pulled back like he likes, her face freshly washed, perfume pressed into that space on his neck she knows he will come and press his face into when he wakes.

It is futile.

She sits at her kitchen table. She's put fresh flowers in the vase on the table. She always let Sasuke sleep in; she marvels at the way he sleeps, so placidly, so untouched. Like a child with a child's face, his porcelain skin. Thinking of this, she crosses her ankles and puts her head in her hands.

_Little does she feel the life springing and bouncing and jumping inside of her, rattling like the electricity of a midsummer storm, attaching and preparing to suck and to grow and to forever claw out a place in her womb in her body in her heart._

Sasuke glides in and takes his seat, stares at his breakfast. "Thank you," he says, and she knows that he still can't believe somebody would take the trouble to do this for him.

She wants to ask, _what do you eat on the road?_ but she does not want to bring that heaviness to the table, not now, not on such a short visit. She doesn't want to turn Sasuke to stone with her words like a wicked Medusa. She doesn't want that at all.

So instead she says, "It's no problem," because she means that more than she would mean _you're welcome._

After breakfast, they sit on her balcony, Sasuke shirtless with a towel around his shoulders, while Sakura cuts his hair. Her balcony faces a courtyard, not a street, with nobody currently inside of it; birds flock to a fountain and chirp. She thinks, strangely, of Hinata's cousin. Of sadness and sacrifice. Then she shakes her head and takes the scissors to Sasuke's hair, so long it's nearly past his shoulder blades. She has already washed it in the shower last night, him sitting on a stool between her legs, his eyes closed and long neck bared back so that his head butted her stomach. _And when Sarada is old enough Sakura will do the same for her and she will marvel at how two different people can evoke such two different versions of the same feeling and how these feelings spring from her, from inside her, the eternal mother, always destined to nurture and see off those she loves, a mother bird in an elaborate nest made by her elusive elaborately feathered mate, staring at the same sky day in and day out, her daughter's beautiful hair in her hands as she sighs and says Mama, don't pull so hard, you're hurting me._

In the present, she smiles and jokes. "The usual, Mr. Uchiha?"

Sasuke laughs.

Sunlight pours over their head, falls as easily on their shoulders as black strands of Sasuke's hair. They flutter to the ground of the courtyard. Sakura jokes, and Sasuke laughs, and the sky is clear and full and abundant as she presses her lips to his forehead and waits and waits and waits.

 

-

 

 

When the whores come to him and ask him for his money, Sasuke says, "I'm a married man."

They say, "Oh, baby, but why would you leave your wife? She must be _terrible_. I would never let you go."

Sasuke says nothing and walks away every time, but every time he thinks, and he knows: Sakura will let him go, and that is why he will return to her.


End file.
